In 2006, everybody told New York filmmaker Jason Wishnow it was career suicide. Nobody wants to watch academic lectures on a computer screen, they said. More than 1-billion online views later (including from, of all places, outer space), TEDTalks naysayers couldn’t have been more wrong--securing for Mr. Wishnow, the filmmaker who helped transform the ideas-driven TEDTalks platform into its highly-watchable modern format, a legacy in the pantheon of viral-content gods.

Geekettes cofounders Jess Erickson and Denise Philipp didn’t set out to stimulate a movement that would sweep across Europe and spill into the United States. They just had a gut feeling that women were hungry, as they themselves were, and wanted to create a platform in response to that need.

It’s a complex challenge that requires interdisciplinary solutions: 7.2 billion people currently inhabit the planet, and an estimated one billion go to bed hungry on a daily basis.

Food production and distribution are, and have been, in a state of crisis. By 2050, the global population is expected to reach nine billion, and the United Nations projects that farmers must produce 70 percent more food globally (from 2009 levels) to sustain the world’s predicted population growth.